The drink was a tawny golden color. Shadow took a sip, tasting an odd blend of sour and sweet on his tongue. He could taste the alcohol underneath, and a strange blend of flavors. It reminded him a little of sugar and water, but it was sweeter, and far stranger.

“Okay,” said Shadow. “I tasted it. What was it?”

“Mead,” said Wednesday. “Honey wine. The drink of heroes. The drink of the gods.”

Here’s one definition. It’s in an essay called “Trolls for Trump,” by Andrew Marantz (The New Yorker, 31 October 2016):

a loose, on-line affiliation of white nationalists, neo-monarchists, masculinists, conspiracists, belligerent nihilists, and social media trolls. The alt-right has no consistent ideology; it is a label, like “snob” or “hipster,” that is often disavowed by people who exemplify it. The term typically applies to conservatives and reactionaries who are active on the Internet and too anti-establishment to feel at home in the Republican Party.

The essay then goes on to show how the alt-right is seeding social media with misinformation.

As if any thinking person didn’t know that already?

She never presses “like” anymore unless she’s vetted the tweeter. Whereas in the old days (pre-Nov. 8), she would just blithely follow back.

Then she’d discover — days, weeks, or even months later — that the person endorses the Muslim Ban and the Muslim Registry. And it fills her with so much shame.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Andy, a plump, middle-aged real-estate wheeler/dealer whose world comes crashing down on him in a very big way, after he has the genius idea of knocking off his parents’ mom-and-pop jewelry store in a Westchester mall (It’s like Fargo, only twice as painful):

Andy to his brother Hank (Ethan Hawke):

It’s too late to think. It’s too late.

Also, Seymour Hoffman’s character is a cocaine addict. Watching him do a line is gut-wrenching.

Noir City: San Francisco’s 15th Annual Film Noir Festival, at the Castro

Shadow knew that the phone companies whacked a three-dollar surcharge on every call made from a prison phone. That was why operators are always real polite to people calling from prisons, Shadow had decided: they knew that he paid their wages.

“Something feels weird,” he told Laura. That wasn’t the first thing he said to her. The first thing was “I love you,” because it’s a good thing to say if you can mean it, and Shadow did.

Conway went to Trinity Washington University, a Catholic college in Washington, DC, and received a law degree from George Washington University. She pointed out that, while Hillary Clinton failed the D.C. bar exam in 1973, before passing in Arkansas, Conway was allowed into the D.C. bar after passing the exams in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Conway said she thought about that during the first debate: “Boy, she really can cram a lot of information into her head for one performance. How the heck did she fail the D.C. bar?”

In the meantime, self has been working on it, adding a sentence here, a paragraph there.

Here’a an excerpt.

It was true the boy’s eyes were strange, as if icecaps were growing in the irises. He tried to staunch the spread, but hour by hour the ice seemed to grow. Until, he hated to say it, the boy had gone completely blind. But he still pretended to watch the sky.